HBR Daily Stat: Before Sending a Foreign Colleague That Sympathy Card, Ponder This

The stat:

Comparable selections of sympathy cards in the U.S. and Germany contained an average of 2.90 and 7.30 negative words each, respectively, and 3.50 and 1.35 positive words each, supporting a hypothesis that American culture encourages people to be more positive in the face of sadness, say Birgit Koopmann-Holm and Jeanne L. Tsai of Stanford University. The American cards were also about one-sixth as likely as their German counterparts to include images of death. While Germans are largely descended from people who have remained in Europe and accepted their lot over the centuries, many Americans are descended from emigrants who left their negative environments and focused on a brighter future, and these outlooks seem to be evident in the two cultures’ present-day values, the researchers suggest.

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